Posted on 05/29/2021 5:02:27 AM PDT by Kaslin
Last summer, when a heat wave rolled across the western United States, California residents experienced energy blackouts as a result of a difficult-to-manage power grid. Even after that experience, which put residents’ health at risk due to excessive heat exposure, California continued its push to ban fracking, shut down nuclear power plants, and rely solely on renewable energy. Now, anew report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) states that “California is at risk of energy emergencies during periods of normal peak summer demand and high risk when above-normal demand is widespread in the west.”
The report says that there is a 400-megawatt shortfall expected at peak demand. This shortfall will come despite an addition of over 3 gigawatts, the majority of which will come from solar power, and an additional 675 megawatts of new battery storage systems. These increases are still expected not to be enough when California needs energy most and show that California hasn’t learned its lesson.
The issue last year, and likely this summer as well, was that when energy demand rose to peak demand—when people returned home after work in the late afternoon and the heat of the day remained—solar power production dropped off dramatically. While increased battery storage may help to overcome the lack of solar power production, California is still going to face difficulties with managing their energy grid this summer.
The NERC report does state that the increase of solar power and battery storage should help mitigate issues in the late summer, the time when California experienced the blackouts last year. But the reality is that currently, California is in a bad position to handle even normal summer energy grid demands.
California, as the sole state with a “high risk” status from the NERC report, paints a concerning picture of our nation’s energy future if the climate activists get their way and aggressive climate policies are embraced at the federal level. The Biden administration has certainly followed this aggressive climate policy path, particularly with the recent U.S. Paris Climate Agreement pledges of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50-52% by 2023 and having a net zero emissions economy by no later than 2050.
Meanwhile, while often hailed as a “leader” and “example for other states” by climate activists, California has thrown itself headlong into embracing renewable energy and vilifying any other types of energy. But this has also already made their electricity generation unreliable and it’s only going to get worse if they continue down this policy path. Governor Newsom is pushing to ban fracking by 2024. The sole operational nuclear power facility in the state, which produces almost10 percent of the state’s energy, is scheduled to close beginning in 2024 as well. These are dangerous steps for California and puts Californians at risk.
Ironically, this isn’t even the best way to fight climate change and bring down emissions. Innovations that have made traditional fuel sources cleaner have driven our reduced emissions and improved environment.
Fracking made natural gas inexpensive, allowing it to overcome coal as the main source of electricity generation for our nation, a change which has helped us to greatly reduce emissions and keep energy costs low. Nuclear power, while playing a smaller role in our nation’s electricity generation at around20 percent, is carbon-free, cheap, and reliable. Our nuclear power capacity has remained stable at 20 percent for the last three decades but new technology coming online will reduce initial project costs and open up opportunities for additional nuclear power generation. Nuclear power has an important role to play in our clean energy future.
The rolling blackouts across the state last summer should have been a wake-up call for the state. Even now, this NERC report is warning state leadership once again that their energy policies are putting their residents at risk. California needs to change its course and show true leadership by recognizing the limitations of renewable energy and finding innovative ways to both reduce emissions and provide reliable, affordable energy to its residents. A first step will be to stop attacking nuclear power and fracking and stabilize their energy grid by incorporating these reliable and clean energy sources.
100 miles per person per day us way to high. Virtually no one drives a hundred miles per day commuter or otherwise.
The over all total yearly average is 36 miles per day.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm
With the average daily commuter doing under 30 round trip per work day.
https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1006/ML100621425.pdf
Warm the cockles of heart - Idioms by The Free Dictionary
idioms.thefreedictionary.com
warm the cockles of one's heart, to. To gratify; to make someone feel good.
This term comes from the Latin for the heart’s ventricles, cochleas cordis, and has been used figuratively since the late seventeenth century. “This contrivance of his did inwardly rejoice the cockles of his heart,” wrote John Eachard ( Observations upon the Answer to Contempt of Clergy, 1671).
You forgot to factor running the A/C while stuck in traffic. Imagine LA freeways when someone forgot to get a full charge before heading to work.
Also, there’s this crazy plan to use EV batteries as an energy store during the day, charged by solar. Then when the sun goes down, they will draw on that stored power until demand drops. Then they will recharge the cars. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
I leased a Tesla S for a year in hot North Texas we have months of over 100F here. At no point during my lease did my miles per kWh go below 3 most of the time it was 3.5 to 4 kWh per mile this was in bumper to bumper grid lock over a ten mile each way commuter. EV do better in bumper to bumper traffic than ICE cars. First they don’t idle burning fuel just sitting there. They only use energy to move and then recover 80+% of that to come to a halt via regen braking. Second they use heat pumps for climate control same as a home heat pump which have SER ratings in the 13s plus cooled seats which drastically cuts even further the AC loads you cool the person first air second.
Second I have solar panels two axis tracking ones at that on my very large Texas roof. 4500sqft plus of flat roof space. It’s a 15,000 watt per hour system that hits full power 30 min after sunrise and tracks the sun till 15 before sunset. During January the shortest days of the year are still ten hours of sunlight in August it’s over 14. In August I keep my dual HVAC at 68 degrees and have never used more than 80kWh in a day. The panels are pushing 180+ kWh per day in August so I sell to ERCOT 100+ kWh per day in August. That’s well over 300 miles per day of range in a Tesla. It’s economically better for me to sell the power during the day time peak at 40 to 90 cents per kWh and buy back cheap night power at 2 to 3 cents kWh I get whole sale rates via my LLC and have gotten negative rates at night as in paid to use power which happens more than people think in windy Texas when ERCOT puts up negative rates to grid shed wind excess. With that Tesla it was charging at 2 cents or less the whole year that’s equivalent to 20 CENTS per gallon on a equal cents mile per mile basis with a ICE that gets 30mpg. The math is not hard. My panels payed for themselves in just over 4 years and have a 25 year capacity warranty, a hail rating to racketball size and have survived the baseball sized hail we got in April 2018 not a single panel was replaced the roof not under the panels was trashed and insurance covered it as it would have covered the panels as well. The inverters carry a 25 year warranty. Right now in 10,000 watt min orders 25 year panels are 19 cents per watt or less. Inverters are 20 cents per watt or less in 8000 watt inverters with a min order of 2. Solar makes perfect sense in sunny Texas we get as verified by 30 year climate data from via noaa.gov 220+ days of sunlight per year with the absolute minimum on Dec 20th at 10 half hours with maximums above 14 hours per day at this latitude.
Sorry inverted the units 3 to 4 miles per kWh is what a Tesla S does in city mode driving. One as thinking in mpg not miles per kWh as is the standard for GGE in the states. Across the pond it’s all unit of energy per 100km traveled so much easier to compare when it’s standardized to a distance traveled not in unit over random distance it will take you.
Scaling to a single family residence application, it only needs a 4” wide trench dug down about 3-4’ in the climate zone of south OK and north TX where my cousin does business at. The back yard is definitely torn up during install though because a couple of hundred feet of polypropylene tube is lateraled back and forth in a closed loop with a pump and a shell and tube heat exchanger adjacent to the outdoor heat pump.
The install crew is generally onsite 2-3 days. Factors that extend the on-site time are rock breaking and if restoring the back yard via fine grading and lawn reseeding/sodding is in the scope of work. A local licensed electrician is also needed to install the pump power and relay interface to the HVAC.
A couple of hundred feet of trench opening, rolling the polypropylene tube in and covering can be done in one day unless dealing with significant rock breaking. Polypropylene tube in this scale of application usually does not need bedding because a tight leveling tolerance is not needed and the crush resistance far exceeds the loading. Soil shifting over time is very unlikely to exceed the bending capacity of polypropylene and there are no buried fittings for tree roots to weasel through.
Polypropylene tube rated for underground duty is used. No crappy Sch 40 PVC, I hate the stuff. Sch 120 PVC pipe rated for buried duty is more expensive than polypropylene. Metal pipe has much better heat transfer than polypropylene but has a finite service life or is way expensive. Polypropylene tube is one and done and will last longer than the house.
I imagine scaling of the ID with polypropylene is far slower and lower accumulation than any metal pipe, too (even with water treatments on the secondary side.
I use it for drip irrigation. It is amazing stuff.
Scaling is absolutely lower than steel pipe as you point out. The vulnerable point for scale or particulate plugging is the orifice the water is dripped from. Replaceable or field serviceable nozzles remedy this though.
What kind of application do you work with? Agriculture, greenhouse, garden?
A shameless plug for a supplier is Harrington Industrial Plastics. I worked with them pretty much exclusively for 20 years as they usually were a one stop supplier or at least on the bid list for what I would be working with in the lab, pilot plant and commercial scales. Top tier manufacturers, no Chinese crap.
I have no idea who or where drip irrigation was first put to use. However IIRC, it was Israel that first implemented it extensively in the agricultural application. The desert bloomed.
As I understand it, precise amounts of water can be metered exactly on an individual plant such that the farmer can input things like soil temperature and moisture, dry and wet bulb temperatures, solar radiation, rainfall, plant growth, etc. to constantly adjust irrigation rate to a tight optimum. Farming is quite scientific and computerized now once you step up to industrial size.
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